Integration of Technology in the Classroom...

Very thoughtful article with a great collaborative project:

Connecting Kids with Content: Using Projects and Technology to Close the Achievement Gap  

One of my favorite projects, the Decades Project, is a joint U.S. History/U.S. Literature project originally created by Karyn Koven and me. We take it on early in the second semester of the junior year. Student groups are assigned a decade between the 1920’s and the present. Each group must then create a 5-10 minute presentation of the most important events of that decade. Please take note of this. They must determine what is “most important.” Right from the beginning we have created a “need to know.” How can they determine what is most important if they don’t know quite a bit about what happened?